There is a debate in the literature as to how directly phonology accesses syntactic category information. Positions have been staked out as to whether the access is direct or indirect. Dragana Šurkalović’s new thesis, to be defended on Friday, January 22nd, addresses this debate squarely right in the title: The No Reference Hypothesis: A Modular Approach to the Syntax-Phonology Interface.

Congratulations to Andrea Márkus for filing her CASTL PhD thesis, entitled “Taming the Hungarian (in)transitivity zoo. Undiagnosed species and a complete derivation of the morphosyntactic patterns.” By my count this bring the number of completed CASTL PhDs to 22!

We’re only still recovering from the last doctoral defense, and a new CASTL dissertation has just been filed! The new one is entitled “The No-Reference Hypothesis: A Modular Approach to the Syntax-Phonology Interface” — so there should be another exciting defense in a few months.

In case you hadn’t already heard, CASTL has advertised a PhD position attached to the CASTL-FISH research group. This was announced on the Linguist List back in May, and is also on Jobbnorge, with a deadline of June 16th. However, we just noticed that the job description on Jobbnorge is only in Norwegian, so we are fixing that (we may also extend the deadline a little bit because of the mistake).